When you read through your Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure walker handbook, you may think to yourself, “Geez, what am I going to do on all those long training walks, it’s going to be so boring!”. After all, while you are walking, you should not be listening to an MP3 player, using your phone, updating Twitter, posting blog posts or sending text messages. All of these are prohibited with good reason, too keep you safe. But it does bring up the question, what ARE you going to do on that 18 mile walk. This week I’ll explore some of your options and also ask you to post comments of any other suggestions you may have!

Bring a Friend

The most obvious solution is to bring a friend along with you for the walk. Now you notice that I didn’t say, bring a teammate. While your teammate probably qualifies as a friend, there are many walkers who either do not walk on a team or if they are on a team they don’t live near any of their teammates. So ask your non-3-Day friends if they would walk with you. I’m not suggesting that you bring them along on a full 12 mile walk, but tell them you’re going on a 12 mile walk and see if they would walk 4 of them with you. That way you’re not scaring them with 12 miles, but you have 4 miles that goes a lot quicker. Because when you’re talking with friends the miles will go a lot quicker than when you’re by yourself.

Count the Lions

On my first 3-Day Kandice, my team captain, and I came up with a game that kind of alleviated some of the boredom. You can do this on training walks too and while it is probably more fun with multiple people you can still do it on your own. As we walked through our first day, we started noticing that there were a lot of houses that had stone lions out front. A lot of them looked oddly out of place. We decided to start counting every time we saw a lion (even though there were two at most houses we still counted individually to make sure to include the houses with only 1 or with more than 2 lions).

It kept us on our toes about being aware of our surroundings and was kind of fun at the end of the day to say, “wow, we saw 37 lions today”. Maybe the area that you are walking in doesn’t have lions, but I’m sure if you look around long enough you’ll find some oddity that a lot of people have that you can start counting to help tick away the time a little bit. Keep in mind that since this game is only really occurring when you see the lions, you can play this with some of the other suggestions. Thanks to Kandice for playing count the lions with me!

Blog-Fund Raiser

I walk a lot by myself and I use a lot of this time to think about what I’m going to write in my next blog or what I’m going to do for my next fund raiser. I even thought up the idea for this post when I was walking a week or two ago. Most of the script for the first week of my video fund raiser I thought about and went over in my head many times on a walk before I even recorded it. Yes, it’s not necessarily hugely entertaining but I have found that it makes the miles go by a little quicker.

3-Day Alphabet

This is a game that I’m not sure I ever played but it makes me think of childhood car games. Basically the goal of this game is to go through the entire alphabet saying things that are related to the 3-Day that begin with the letter you are on. For Instance:

A – Arch Support
B – Body Glide
C – Camel Back

And so forth. If you’re playing with friends, take turns and go through the entire alphabet. It gets harder as you, so I don’t feel bad about giving some suggestions for the first three.

Sing a Song

While it may occasionally get you strange looks from people that don’t understand that you’re walking on a very long walk, singing can actually help pass the time. You can sing a song you already know, something that’s on the radio or go back to your days at camp and pick something from there! If you can’t think of anything, you could make up your own song. Since you’re only singing it for you, it doesn’t even have to be a good song!

Team Building

Another thing that I like to try to do while I walk is think about how I can get more people on the team. I like to think about my friends and who I think might be willing to join and raise the money and do the walk. If I think of some that might be good, I think of how I would approach them to get them to walk. Another way that you can think of team building is if you have a friend walking with you from the first suggestion. Now would be a great time to tell them about why you’re walking on the 3-Day and what a great cause it is that all these funds are going to and about the great experience walking on the walk. I’m not saying to accost them and make them not want to walk with you again, but sometimes just sharing your experience from the 3-Day is enough to get people interested in joining up. At the very least it allows you to spread more awareness about the cause!

So those are my few suggestions about alleviating some of the boredom while you are out doing training walks. Got an idea that I missed? Post it to the comments so that everyone can see it!